Two Minds Blog

This blog has always included a technology component, including using sensor devices to measure the workings of the Intuitive mind ; using technology-based surveys to  predict exercise or diabetes self-management ; delivering tailored messages to support exercise or reduce fatigue ; using technology to support a social reinforcement approach to behavior change; changing electronic health record systems to adapt to clinicians' needs as they become more tired during the course of a shift; and using  biofeedback to support mindfulness. These technologies are also gaining momentum among researchers and technology developers nationally. In fall 2022 I had the chance to attend a Smart Health conference on technology and health that was jointly sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (which funds health care research) and the National Science Foundation (which funds basic science), which highlighted recent and ongoing work at the intersection of health care ...

It’s time again for New Year’s resolutions, which provide one of the greatest natural experiments in the world for those of us who study health behavior change. As I have probably noted here before, the average duration of a new behavior is between 1 and 6 months, so you can look for the early-January crowds in your gym to diminish right around Groundhog Day. This finding fits well with Prochaska’s stages of change model , which suggests that 3-6 months is the amount of time it takes to move from the action to the maintenance stage — i.e., for a new behavior to become a habit. After that transition, the new behavior is much more likely to “stick” for the long term. One method that many people use to get through this transitional time is to harness the power of streaks .  A streak can be defined as any behavior that is repeated (often daily) over a period of time, without interruption. The lack of interruption is crucial to this definition: The reason it’s useful to track a streak ...

This year's blog posts included a few one-off topics like the idea that orchestra conductors communicate with musicians by way of the Intuitive mind; a post on medieval understandings of psychology that was published on my 50th birthday in a nod to my own "middle ages"; and a look at the role of social connections in forming our identities  that was done as a podcast interview by my daughter the high school senior. But there were also some consistent themes across this year's postings on the Two Minds Blog: Theory Development: the Neuroscience of Stress and Trauma. The blog had more applications of Two Minds Theory than new theoretical developments this year, but many of the neuroscience-oriented posts were centered around stress and trauma. Many public reports this year drew attention to long-term mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from increased  anxiety among adolescents , to  PTSD reactions  from stressors experienced in 2020...

When I learned about brain physiology in the early 1990s, we were taught that people can't grow new neurons (brain cells), and that neurons stop growing new connections around age 25, both of which make new learning harder for adults. Popular wisdom says the same: You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Now that I have passed the 50-year mark myself, I'm glad to report this was a false conclusion. My daughter had an elementary school classmate with epilepsy, who needed to have half of his brain removed. One approach in these cases is to sever the corpus callosum, a thick set of neural fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres, which gives people two semi-autonomous brains. But this boy’s seizures were so bad that the usual approach didn’t do the trick, and his doctors were worried that he would die without a more radical approach. So in about the 5 th grade he had another operation in which his left hemisphere was completely removed. Physicians told him that he mig...

With Laurel Messer PhD, Assistant Professor at the Barbara Davis Center for Juvenile Diabetes We all want to be effective decision-makers, but success in this area depends on having an accurate understanding of the decision we are facing. This concept is sometimes known by the term "situational awareness." The UK construction industry defines situational awareness as  " being aware of what is happening around you in terms of where you are, where you are supposed to be, and whether anyone or anything around you is a threat to your health and safety ." For pilots , situational awareness has been described as an "integrated understanding of factors that will contribute to the safe flying of the aircraft under normal or non-normal conditions."  Situational awareness has been discussed in fields as diverse as air traffic control, manufacturing, refinery operations, and nuclear power safety.   And the term situational awareness has been used in the nursing liter...

  Who are you? Most people answer that question first by stating their name. Once we have done that, we might talk about our occupation, our other important social roles (husband, father, son), our personality, or our values. Sometimes we will pick a group membership that also conveys something about our likely values and beliefs (I'm Lutheran, I teach at a college of nursing). We might state our race or ethnicity, our gender, or our age. Psychologist Carl Rogers said that all of these things make up our "self-image," our mental picture of who we are. If our self-image matches up with who we want  to be, then we have what Rogers first described as "self-esteem." If not, then we probably feel bad, and maybe we come to hide who we "really are" from others. My daughter is a high school senior who was asked to create a podcast for her English class on a topic related to identity. Another psychologist, Erik Erikson , suggested that questions of identity ar...

  Synesthesia is the mental experience of perceiving one type of sense data in terms of another. For example, people might see specific colors when they hear specific sounds ( sound-to-color synesthesia ); associate colors with particular words, letters, or numbers ( grapheme-color synesthesia ); or experience specific tastes when they hear certain words or sounds ( lexical-gustatory synesthesia ). As many as 35 different types of synesthesia have been identified, and individual people might experience just one of them or more than one. The rate of synesthesia in the general population (i.e., people who aren't specifically trying to create the experience with drugs or other methods, but just have it happen to them naturally) is about 1 in 2,000 people , so it's rare but not highly unusual. Famous people who have reported spontaneous synesthesia include the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, the composer Olivier Messiaen, and the physicist Richard Feynman. Nabokov described his synesth...